Quote Originally Posted by Winterwind View Post
Bolding and underlinement by me.
There's your contradiction right there. All of the points you mention here are subjective issues, not objective ones.
Umm. Nitpicker.

What I intended to say was that design should be dependent on those players (even if they're hypothetical or generalized ones). Objectivity is something I have less experience with, I don't think I've applied it at all, but design of electronics is one of my main classes.


Thanks for being encouraging, I know I need as much of it as I need and I do appreciate it. I suppose I will supply what I actually think about more fundamental design, related to this topic. Or, well, you might not think it's relevant, but I do. My ranting professor likes to go on about this, so it's pretty heavily ingrained. Design heavily depends on the person buying it, a design is only good if it satisfies those needs economically. Bad design may flourish, he likes to cite examples in audio amplifiers, and says that it's due to marketing combined with ignorance of computers (I know a few fancy terms to watch out for. Also, don't buy anything with vacuum tubes, unless you're really into a wild steampunk lifestyle or something.).

The personal factors you dismissed in favor of objectivity in that first post, are IMHO, the most important parts of design. Everyone would be happy to have all the features available, but the priorities of people are what cause sales. It's usually a trade-off between features or expense, some features may be mutually exclusive or at least very expensive. I think that this heavily applies to videogames because people can't all agree on what games they like best, the small differences appear important to them. People will commonly say that they want everything, but eh, "retro" games can be pretty popular, I think partially due to good design. And, although I'm not qualified to say much about it, marketing may be important. You'll actually want to flood the market with tricked-out, specialized things instead of trying to design for multipurpose, so yeah, more heroes are better, more games are better, if they satisfy.


You guys say that Dusk doesn't know how to balance, but I think it could be just that balance isn't one of Dusk's design priorities. When I played with them, VZ people weren't very cruel to me, anyway, they were interesting in pushing their own limits. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.